In another thread that seems to have died out, I mentioned that I had never seen any Indian pottery when I lived in Massachusetts. Last night I found a site that told why. The New England aborigines did indeed have pottery, but their technology was sadly deficient. They apparently did not know how to get high enough temperatures to cause clay to vitrify, and so their pots were very fragile, and disintegrated rapidly. I have been to several archaeologic digs, and never heard pottery mentioned. Only tiny pieces are to be found.
The same site mentioned corn being soaked until it was soft, and then pounded in large bowl-like structures made by using fire to hollow out hardwood stumps, from which charred wood was scraped. The soaked corn was then pounded with a large hard wood pestle. It was such a frequent activity, that boats in fog could use the sound to tell them when they were close to shore.
The pounded product was called "samp" and was often slowly cooked into a porridge.